A broad range of video equipment from cameras in smart phone to video equipment for large production studios is available to individuals and businesses. The video footage recorded by video equipment often appear wobbly due to unwanted motion of objects in the recorded video due to e.g., unintended shaking of the camera, rolling shutter effect, etc.
Different techniques are used to stabilize a video sequence and remove unwanted camera movements. The objective of motion stabilization is to remove the jitter produced by hand-held devices. Camera jitter introduces extraneous motion that is not related to the actual motion of objects in the picture. Therefore, the motion appears as random picture movements that produce disturbing visual effects.
Image stabilization methods have been developed in the past that model the camera motion and distinguish between the intended and unintended motions. Other methods have also been developed that generate a set of curves to track different camera movements such as translation, rotation, and zoom. The curves are smoothed and the differences between the unsmoothed curves and the smoothed curves are used to define a set of transformations to apply to each video image to remove the unwanted camera motion.